Stories like these challenge assumptions around our communities, and what they are like
Tell me about Demand the Impossible—how did you come to write it?
The play came about because an activist friend of ours in the anarchist network in Cardiff was spied on by an undercover police officer, Marco Jacobs.
We thought a lot of the coverage of the spycops had been very sensational and not based on conversations with those involved.
So about two years ago, we began writing the play together. We wanted to write a play which would be of use to the campaign and to those involved in the spycops scandal.
And we wanted to adopt a wider perspective, to put police infiltration in a wider context of injustice.
The spycops story is close to us, but there is a much wider story, of blacklisting and of surveillance on black justice movements. Really, the police have spied on everything from the 1960s to today.
So there’s a window into the personal impact of the spying and the wider impact.
Sometimes the women involved are dismissed as “activists”. People think it happened to them because they were activists, so it doesn’t matter to them.
We wanted to challenge that notion—this way of policing impacts on us all. It slows down change and it makes it harder to win the future we all want.
The police have used the same tactics for hundreds of years. Our play tells the story of policing and its history, its complexity, and also provides glimpses into the human stories and explore why we protest, what we are fighting for.
The state interacts with our desires and our hopes for a better world.
The play focuses a lot on surveillance and technology. There’s lots of glitching in an immersive AI world, a weird futurist world and very different kinds of activism.
The story is a global one, it is a universal story about political polarisation across the world.
They test surveillance AI technology in Gaza, so we acknowledge the interactions behind the development of technology.
We look at facial recognition. Cardiff was one of the first cities to use facial recognition technology at the Millennium Stadium.
A couple of years ago there were riots in Cardiff, in Ely. I watched the riots streamed on Facebook live—everyone was watching. We were seeing young people acting in the heat of the moment and incriminating themselves.
And the play has a thread on the spycops. Another thread focuses on a brilliant artist, who was involved in the Black Lives Matter campaign in Cardiff. She has been involved in justice campaigns all her life, because of race and class. Her own experiences show it’s not just spycops—it is all interlinked.
It is all part of the same state and the same system.
The third thread is led by a dancer, and it is about blacklisting, and the complex relationships most working class people have with the police.
I went to the spycops inquiry. It was an amazing moment to be in the company of such incredible women. These women who are still standing, united, and who painstakingly remember every detail of what happened.
But Bob Lambert, one of the spycops, he was fumbling, not committing to the remembering.
I am involved in Grenfell United and there is a pattern of non‑remembering of the people who have to be held to account.
It was the same after the Aberfan Disaster, this lack of accountability, lack of justice, lack of respect.
And so often it is ordinary people who have to fight to make the state accountable.
Belinda Harvey, who was involved in the spycops scandal, was a midwife who reminded me of my mum. The women were just collateral damage—there was no humanity.
There was a huge impact of these things on the women and the wider experience—on the movement, on protest, on change, on those caught in the cross fire, on my friends.
Researching the blacklisting campaign, I was pointed to a man in Cardiff, a man I had known for years as I grew up on a council estate in Cardiff. He was an electrician, an ordinary man, but he was reading political books. When I offered to pay him for his time, he said, “Give it to Gaza”.
Stories like these challenge assumptions around our communities, and what they are like.
Our communities include people who are educated, who are international, who are activists together—people who give a shit and fight for it.
What change would you like to see?
The play is called Demand the Impossible which is a slogan from the 1968 uprising in Paris.
We have all been thinking about those moments where we get to live the impossible—maybe it’s a protest camp or living outside the state.
I really want a complete overthrow of the state and something new and different. I don’t know what that looks like, but I know it is possible.
Has Dev Hynes, as Blood Orange, just made the album of the Autumn?
Essex Honey feels like kicking a ball against a wall on your own in the cold after school. Hynes has spoken of how this album is about “collective grief and loss”, and you can feel that through the music like an ache.
It’s characterised by an overt Englishness that runs throughout. This is especially in contrast to his previous album Negro Swan, which had some very Los Angeles wellness influencer, therapy speak-inflected spoken word sections.
You’re never more than a few bars from a break beat skipping across the track.
Hynes is also a classically trained musician. He’s scored films and performed Philip Glass Etudes at Carnegie Hall. These two very different worlds combine and run parallel to each other through his music.
Most songs are driven by pretty straight and solid synthetic drum programming with playful flute glissandos alongside. The effect is almost like butterflies flitting around a steel column. The two big strains of influence never quite merge into a whole, giving Blood Orange such a distinctive sound.
There’s an enormous guest list here, Caroline Polachek, Lorde and Mustafa the Poet are all on just one song, Mind Loaded. They blend in so seamlessly it’s almost a wasted opportunity. But everything feels very intentional.
The Last of England is a standout for me—it feels like the album’s mission statement. It opens with a montage of reverby voices that captures the feeling of being a disoriented kid in a room full of adults talking.
Nothing here feels like a single. This is a set of songs all cut from the same cloth and exploring the same themes.
There’s little here you’d put on a playlist to play at a late summer BBQ. But since when has that been what Blood Orange is for?
Simon Birch
